Willem Luyten was born to Dutch parents in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, and moved to the Netherlands in 1912. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Amsterdam and his Ph.D., as the first student of Ejnar Hertzsprung, at Leiden in 1921. He worked at Lick Observatory, Harvard College Observatory, and, for nearly sixty years, at the University of Minnesota. For many of those years he was the university’s sole astronomer. In the 1920s he used proper motions to obtain statistical parallaxes and refine the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of local stars. Using plates taken in the southern hemisphere, many of them by himself at Harvard’s Bloemfontein station, he found proper motions of more than 120,000 stars. Later he repeated the National Geographic Society-Palomar Sky Survey, had the engineers at Control Data Corp. build him an automated computerized plate scanner and measuring machine, and found 400,000 more. He did this despite losing the sight of one eye in 1925. He determined the density of stars in space as a function of luminosity and discovered the great majority of the white dwarfs known in his time. He also analyzed orbits of many spectroscopic binary stars. A highly successful teacher and popularizer, he wrote more than 200 articles for the New York Times. Calling himself a curmudgeon, he engaged in numerous disputes with fellow astronomers over priority and accuracy of discoveries.